Distant Reader - author-donneJohn-freebo

Introduction

This is a Distant Reader "study carrel", a set of structured data intended to help the student, researcher, or scholar use & understand a corpus.

This study carrel was created on 2021-05-24 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader zip2carrel process, and the input was a Zip file locally cached with the name input-file.zip. Documents in the Zip file have been saved in a cache, and each of them have been transformed & saved as a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against these plain text files. For example, a short narrative report has been created. This Web page is a more verbose version of that report.

All study carrels are self-contained -- no Internet connection is necessary to use them. Download this carrel for offline reading. The carrel is made up of many subdirectories and data files. The manifest describes each one in greater detail.

Size

There are 17 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 977,430 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 57,495 words long. If you dig deeper, then you might want to save yourself some time by reading a shorter item. On the other hand, if your desire is for more detail, then you might consider reading a longer item. The following charts illustrate the overall size of the carrel.

Readability

On a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is very difficult and 100 is very easy, the documents have an average readability score of 95. Consequently, if you want to read something more simplistic, then consider a document with a higher score. If you want something more specialized, then consider something with a lower score. The following charts illustrate the overall readability of the carrel.

Word Frequencies

By merely counting & tabulating the frequency of individual words or phrases, you can begin to get an understanding of the carrel's "aboutness". Excluding "stop words", some of the more frequent words include:

god, man, may, shall, yet, will, one, us, though, first, church, christ, men, doe, now, must, haue, much, hee, world, good, therefore, made, onely, make, bee, see, come, say, might, death, many, wee, himselfe, place, great, body, another, selfe, things, life, way, vpon, law, gods, sinne, every, well, doth, love

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Fifty sermons. The second volume preached by that learned and reverend divine, John Donne ..., Pseudo-martyr Wherein out of certaine propositions and gradations, this conclusion is euicted. That those which are of the Romane religion in this kingdome, may and ought to take the Oath of allegiance., and Biathanatos a declaration of that paradoxe or thesis, that selfe-homicide is not so naturally sinne, that it may never be otherwise : wherein the nature and the extent of all those lawes, which seeme to be violated by this act, are diligently surveyed / written by Iohn Donne ....

The most frequent two-word phrases (bigrams) include:

holy ghost, one another, man may, christ jesus, every man, let us, shall see, saint paul, saint augustine, may bee, god will, haue beene, first part, christ iesus, god himselfe, early english, english books, may see, iohn baptist, thine owne, romane church, every one, see god, take heed, shall bee, books online, one man, roman church, whole world, wee may, must bee, god shall, originall sinne, christian church, every day, every thing, might haue, second part, will make, page images, creation partnership, last day, text creation, though god, shall come, wee shall, canon law, shall never, wee haue, shall make

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Poems, by J.D. VVith elegies on the authors death Paradoxes, problemes, essayes, characters written by Dr. Donne, dean of Pauls ; to which is added a book of epigrams ; written in Latin by the same author ; translated into English by J. Maine D.D. ; as also, Ignatius his Conclave, a satyr, translated out of the originall copy written in Latin by the same author, found lately amongst his own papers., and Letters to severall persons of honour written by John Donne ... ; published by John Donne, Dr. of the civill law..

While often deemed superficial or sophomoric, rudimentary frequencies and their associated "word clouds" can be quite insightful:

Keywords

Sets of keywords -- statistically significant words -- can be enumerated by comparing the relative frequency of words with the number of times the words appear in an entire corpus. Some of the most statistically significant keywords in the carrel include:

god, tcp, church, man, lord, nature, king, thou, christ, world, thy, law, haue, gods, earth, thing, text, state, soule, shee, sea, scriptures, saint, religion, princes, pope, order, kingdome, holy, good, death, court, wee, thee, spirit, sonne, sermon, selfe, roman, prophet, prince, priest, persons, paul, mee, martyrdome, lucifer, love, like, ignatius

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is another popular approach to connoting the aboutness of a corpus. If the study carrel could be summed up in a single word, then that word might be god, and Pseudo-martyr Wherein out of certaine propositions and gradations, this conclusion is euicted. That those which are of the Romane religion in this kingdome, may and ought to take the Oath of allegiance. is most about that word.

If the study carrel could be summed up in three words ("topics") then those words and their significantly associated titles include:

If the study carrel could be summed up in five topics, and each topic were each denoted with three words, then those topics and their most significantly associated files would be:

Moreover, the totality of the study carrel's aboutness, can be visualized with the following pie chart:

Noun & Verbs

Through an analysis of your study carrel's parts-of-speech, you are able to answer question beyonds aboutness. For example, a list of the most frequent nouns helps you answer what questions; "What is discussed in this collection?":

man, men, world, death, place, body, things, way, life, time, part, hath, nothing, day, selfe, thing, hee, sinne, soule, others, name, nature, light, word, reason, words, power, sin, none, love, himselfe, law, hand, self, earth, glory, sinnes, faith, doth, thy, selves, t, heart, children, rest, purpose, state, flesh, person, opinion

An enumeration of the verbs helps you learn what actions take place in a text or what the things in the text do. Very frequently, the most common lemmatized verbs are "be", "have", and "do"; the more interesting verbs usually occur further down the list of frequencies:

is, be, are, was, have, had, were, did, made, make, see, come, say, do, know, let, being, done, said, take, am, been, doe, hath, bee, says, give, haue, put, call, came, consider, thinke, fall, called, die, makes, does, thought, ''s, think, sayes, given, brought, sent, tell, having, love, found, comes

Proper Nouns

An extraction of proper nouns helps you determine the names of people and places in your study carrel.

god, thou, christ, church, hath, doe, ●, wee, lord, 〉, ◊, haue, 〈, gods, saint, heaven, king, pope, de, l., bee, hee, father, law, holy, c., owne, sir, princes, ghost, s., text, man, sonne, hast, mee, thee, rome, christian, prince, paul, spirit, iohn, angels, moses, popes, kingdome, jesus, david, nature

An analysis of personal pronouns enables you to answer at least two questions: 1) "What, if any, is the overall gender of my study carrel?", and 2) "To what degree are the texts in my study carrel self-centered versus inclusive?"

it, his, he, i, they, we, our, you, him, their, my, them, us, your, me, thy, her, thee, she, himself, themselves, mine, theirs, one, ours, yours, vp, its, ye, hers, ''s, thou, ourselves, hee, vnto, herself, yee, non, ●, us''d, em, elias, à, whosoever, ps, nay, itself, f, e, dy''d

Below are words cloud of your study carrel's proper & personal pronouns.

Adjectives & Verbs

Learning about a corpus's adjectives and adverbs helps you answer how questions: "How are things described and how are things done?" An analysis of adjectives and adverbs also points to a corpus's overall sentiment. "In general, is my study carrel positive or negative?"

other, such, good, many, first, more, great, much, same, own, new, true, last, whole, little, particular, second, better, best, dead, old, himselfe, able, present, holy, ill, next, long, greater, most, least, common, former, haue, worse, third, sure, necessary, naturall, full, greatest, false, content, high, few, doth, heavy, poor, enough, wee

not, so, then, now, yet, therefore, onely, more, too, here, as, there, first, out, well, also, much, thus, that, still, is, never, even, up, most, before, ever, very, away, thereof, long, in, only, enough, no, often, all, rather, off, once, else, sometimes, together, again, far, vs, truly, down, almost, thereby

Next steps

There is much more to a study carrel than the things outlined above. Use this page's menubar to navigate and explore in more detail. There you will find additional features & functions including: ngrams, parts-of-speech, grammars, named entities, topic modeling, a simple search interface, etc.

Again, study carrels are self-contained. Download this carrel for offline viewing and use.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.